Nvidia To Acquire Hugging Face For ₹1.24 Lakh Crore: What Does The AI Company Do?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the chipmaker has agreed to acquire Hugging Face, a widely-used open-source AI model repository, in a deal valued at $12.93 billion (approximately Rs. 12,47,774 crore). Huang shared the news through an official post, explaining that the acquisition aims to scale Hugging Face's platform and make AI more accessible to developers and institutions worldwide.

Hugging Face, founded by Clem Delangue, Julien Chaumond, and Thomas Wolf, has evolved into a prominent hub for the open-source AI community over the past decade. The platform houses over 3 million AI models, more than 500,000 datasets, and around 1 million applications, serving over 18 million developers, researchers, and creators.

Huang noted that more than 200,000 companies rely on Hugging Face to discover, evaluate, customize, and deploy AI systems, making it a crucial meeting point for open-weight model builders in the industry.

Despite the acquisition, Huang assured that Hugging Face will maintain its open, multi-cloud, and multi-accelerator platform. Developers will retain the freedom to choose their preferred models, frameworks, cloud providers, inference services, and computing hardware, with NVIDIA compute not being a prerequisite for building or deploying on the platform. The site will continue to support open-source and open-weight models from every model builder in the ecosystem, not just NVIDIA's own releases.

Huang linked the acquisition to a broader argument about open-weight AI, citing a recent open letter he co-authored with other industry leaders. He emphasized that open models distribute AI leadership across companies, institutions, and communities instead of concentrating it. By making AI capabilities accessible without the need to train systems from scratch, open models enable startups, universities, businesses, and public institutions to leverage advanced AI in various sectors, including manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and education.

Nvidia's existing contributions to Hugging Face played a role in the deal, with the company being the platform's largest contributor of open models and data. Nvidia has released over 500 models and more than 250 open datasets on Hugging Face, reflecting a multi-year commitment to open-source AI tooling. Huang highlighted that the Hugging Face team will continue to operate under its current brand, now backed by NVIDIA's infrastructure, engineering resources, and global reach, which will enhance the platform's reliability, safety, model evaluation, and inference and deployment capabilities.